Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 4th, 2016

[Larry Pardy]

I might say that now, but I don't think our system is geared towards coalition governments. When those instances happened, they created a certain crisis. I think that the crisis was created because we didn't have the mechanisms in place. We didn't have a Governor General who was either elected or had clear rules. They had historical rules that rarely applied. If we went to a minority system, we could see those situations happening a lot more frequently.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Yes, of course.

So you and I are running in an election, and you have the support of nobody, but a few more seats than I do. I have the support of other parties. You approach the GG and say, “I got this”, even though there were public declarations that, at the first moment you try it, others will bring you down. The GG would then turn to the second-place party, under our current mechanisms and rules, and say, “I don't have confidence in Larry's ability to hold government, and my job as Governor General is to seek stability”, which is one of the purviews of the Governor General, “and I'm turning to Cullen to see if he can do it.” That exists under our rules currently, does it not?

[Larry Pardy]

It seems like it's possible, but we haven't had it. I think the reason we haven't is that we've had a system that works based on the party in power. I think it's that we've had majorities most of the time, and we follow the same practice when we have minorities.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Out of the last 20, we've had 11 majorities and nine minorities, so most of the time, barely. We've been a little less stable than proportional-voting countries.

Over the last six decades, we've had more elections than many of the proportional countries in the OECD because there's an incentive in proportional systems, even though you have a minority position often, to maintain the government. There's not an incentive to bring it down just because you're up three or four points in the polls, whereas under first past the post, three or four points can turn everything.

Then we have the policy lurch.

I want to turn this to Mr. Blair and Mr. Coffin.

We heard it earlier in testimony today around issues of social justice, procurement for military equipment, and climate change, which would be an underlying one. Over the last 30 or 40 years, there's been the suggestion that the policy lurch is getting worse. Canadians see themselves as a very stable, safe, boring kind of democracy, but on a policy outcome from the voters' perspective, from the investors' perspective, on an issue like climate change, it's very difficult to know where the government is going to be, even in a general sense, 10 years from now because governments spend a lot of time undoing what the last guy did and coming up with a new thing.

Is there any comment on that in terms of moving to a proportional system where there may be a bit more rudder in the water for Canada and expressing the general will of the population in one direction?

Maybe I'll start with you, Andy.

[Andy Blair]

I think that policy lurch is a real problem under our current system. It's the same in any winner-take-all system that incentivizes, as ours does, politicization of issues that do not necessarily have to be politicized such as climate change, to take your example. You can slice and dice the electorate on issues and wedge your way into a 39%, 37%, or even a majority government, and you can pull the plug when you want to.

Policy lurch is a real problem. There have been a number of examples in Canadian history on this. First we're in the Kyoto accord, and then we're ripping it up. There are lots of different things like that.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

With particular regard to policies that don't do well over four years, is there some correlation to things like poverty? Rarely can a government enact a set of policies that can help alleviate poverty in a very short time. They take time.

[Andy Blair]

Policies that are really short statements that provide a real pop in support are incentivized under winner-take-all systems, whereas longer-term policies that might be harder to implement are disincentivized under our current system. Alleviating poverty would be one potential example, and I think the proof is in the pudding. Look at Professor Lijphart's study of the real results of all those 38 democracies over the last 40 years under consensus style or proportional systems compared to winner-take-all systems.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Nater.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I've quite enjoyed the discussion from a few of the different questioners on the concept of the confidence convention.

Mr. Pardy, you talked a bit about the chancellor's majority and the constructive vote of non-confidence. I find that interesting and fascinating. It harkens back to some of the work done by predecessors of this committee back in the mid-1980s. The McGrath report, for example, provided a number of interesting suggestions on the confidence convention, as did the Lefebvre committee before that on a number of issues.

Going forward from that, I want to push you a bit on some of these things that you mentioned would have to change to go along with a move to a PR-type system. Before we move to any type of electoral change, should we first look at some of these issues, such as the confidence convention and the formation of governments?

[Larry Pardy]

Not before. I think those things go hand in glove with a proportional system. If you're going to go to a system that creates minority parliaments on a regular basis, then you need these sorts of mechanisms in place at that point to achieve stability over the long term.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you for that.

Mr. Coffin, your organization is promoting civic engagement. That's certainly something we would strongly support. I want to look specifically at the younger cohort again. They are generally non-voters or have a lower voting rate than the general population. We did see a small uptick in the last election, which is certainly something to be encouraged.

I want to talk a bit about lowering the voting age. Is that something that you would see as beneficial? To that end, we talked a bit about civic education in past meetings. Is this something you think we need to enhance more at the secondary level and potentially at the primary level as well?

You did mention that you had originally thought about becoming a civics teacher, but instead formed an organization that teaches civics. I want to have your thoughts on the state of civics education in our formal education system.

[Mark Coffin]

I'll answer the question around civics education first.

When I started Springtide Collective and began having conversations about how to go about it, one of the people I went back to was a professor I had at Dalhousie, Katherine Fierlbeck. I asked her, because she's a very smart professor, “How do you go about teaching first-year political science? Given the level of political philosophy knowledge you have, how do you bring yourself down to that level?”

She said, “That's not the problem I have. The problem I have is that my job is for these students to leave my classroom with more information and more knowledge and understanding about how government works than when they came in. I haven't figured out how to do that yet without making them more cynical about the process by the time they leave.”

That's a challenge we have, too. We're working on all ends of the spectrum. One of the things we really value and privilege in our work is intergenerationalism, and we try to bring conversations together that have both old and young. I think part of the challenge with young people not wanting to engage in politics is that the message they're getting from older people is that it's a problem we have to fix.

I think if we were a Silicon Valley company sitting around a boardroom table saying, “Young people aren't using our phones. Maybe they just need education on how our phones work,” we wouldn't be very profitable in the next quarter. Whereas, we should take the approach that there are a few people using our phones and they're sticking around for some reason, so let's talk to them and see how we could make it better.

A lot of those people who are engaged in politics right now are coming to committees like this one and making recommendations for a different system. I think you have to listen to those voices, and I hear that a lot of them are young. I wouldn't put the onus on citizens. If you create a system that people are incented to participate in, they'll learn how to use it.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I want to follow up more generally on the concept of accountability, that direct link between a representative and the voters in a geographic area. Certainly we've had suggestions of a variety of different systems: MMP, STV. However, I want to talk specifically about that link between the MP and their riding, and how important that linkage is from a casework perspective.

Mr. Coffin, I think you decreased the importance of that.

I want to come back maybe to Mr. Pardy to give your comment about how important that direct link is between an MP and their voters, the people who put them in office.

[Larry Pardy]

I think a lot of it is how well you get to know your MP and having a local MP that's familiar to people. However, when you get into things like nomination processes and stuff like that, it's how well the MP can reach out to a reasonably sized constituency to attract support.

Then, when you get into an election process, one of the key opportunities for us is when they have the riding debates. I haven't heard anybody explain how that's going to work in a multi-member riding setting. You would perhaps have five members per party in that riding and perhaps five to seven different parties represented, so you'd be looking at 35 people.

Right now, we do get an opportunity to put the five different representatives of the party, or six or whatever, up on the stage, and local people get to ask them questions for each election. It's a very effective opportunity to get a sense of the people. It's not even always just about accountability, but to get a sense of what that individual is going to be like as a representative.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Aldag.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Okay, I think I'll start with Mr. Coffin.

You had some very interesting statements in your opening comments. You were obviously a bit rushed, and there may have been some details that you didn't get to.

I've been sitting here trying to wrap my mind around one of the things. When our party formed its platform, one of the things that really appealed to me about it was the idea of evidence-based decision-making. In your statements, you opened with this notion that you're a scientist and that there's a lot of good evidence pointing to proportional representation. You didn't say it, but I took it as being a superior kind of system, that it deals with a lot of things that a majoritarian system doesn't.

Yet, as we've been talking to people, to Canadians, over the summer, and to people in the political science field—and this has come up—it seems there are a lot of trade-offs and that there's no perfect system. I'm not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing, but I'd like to give you the chance to try to convince me a bit more that PR is truly superior.

Some of the things you talked about related to party power and policy swings and other elements. On one side, PR can be seen as a benefit in how it addresses those things. Yet with majoritarian systems, I've had constituents of mine say they actually prefer the policy swings. You know exactly where you're going with a Conservative government for 10 years, and some people get tired of them and they get rid of them. Then they put in a Liberal Party for 10 years and you know where the Liberals are going to go.

To have a position that the evidence says the more middle-of-the-road PR system is superior...I'd like you to explain that a bit more.

[Mark Coffin]

Sure thing.

I guess the first place I would start is with the most indisputable evidence, which is numbers based: voter participation and women's representation. With both of them, you can essentially draw a line from first past the post to.... We'll start with voter participation. First past the post has had turnout averages in OECD countries over the last 30 years of just under 60%. We don't really have data for AV systems, because Australia has mandatory voting, but in PR systems it's 68% for list PR, 76% for MMP, and 70.4% for single transferable vote. These are stats from OECD countries over the last 30 years, with mandatory voting countries removed, so there are no incentives and penalties behind it.

For women's representation, simply stated, PR systems have more representation of women. I think the best case to look at is Australia, where they use two different systems, one for the senate and one for the House of Representatives. The senate uses STV, and the House of Representatives uses alternative vote to elect their representatives. Since that's been the case, there's been consistently about a 10% difference, from 25% in the House, to 35% or so in the the senate in recent years, for the number of seats held by women. That's huge.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

It's too bad that my colleague Ms. Sahota's time looking at the women's piece has passed, because we've also heard that in proportional representation systems you often get a 2% to 3% increase. The participation rates don't go up that much. Are there other ways of dealing with participation?

[Mark Coffin]

Where are those statistics coming from?

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

I can get them to you, and you can get yours to me. It's just that there didn't seem to be—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

They were from André Blais, a political scientist at the Université de Montréal.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

I'm just saying that there is a whole bunch of evidence, but it's more of a mixed bag than I was hearing from you. If it's voter participation, that's an issue things like mandatory voting could be another way of dealing with.

[Mark Coffin]

That would definitely raise voter participation.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Okay. It was intriguing and, as I said, I appreciate what you've been able to give us in a short period of time, but I have to challenge the idea that PR is going to solve all of the political ills that we have, just because I think there are a lot of other things we can do.

[Mark Coffin]

I'm not saying it will solve all of them. I'm just saying if you were to pick one thing, the evidence suggests that this could be more transformative than would something like mandatory voting, or something like lowering the voting age. Those may be good ideas on their own, and I haven't done much research into them, but I've looked at some of the statistics you may be referring to and my sense is that the ones that don't have as clear an effect generally involve fewer countries and smaller time frames or countries with more differences in social context. If you look at Turkey, there are very few women representatives in parliament, but there's a social context there that's not seen in Canada or in western European countries, where the situation is probably socially more similar.